Today, the Peruvian State is a booty, a prey tied by the executive and legislative powers, by the old and new political parties, left, center and right, by the politicians on duty. Meanwhile, the citizens watch, perplexed, passive, immobile, not knowing what to do or not being able to do anything. Public offices are auctioned, no longer underground, but in full view of the media. Public policies are inert and criminality takes over the streets. How long can a state on autopilot and in the process of internal assault and rapacity last?
It seemed that we were facing a political blockade of powers that faced a left and right that were radicalized and entrenched in the government and in the congress, respectively. Two powers that threatened each other, covertly at first and then openly, with a dissolution and a vacancy; who had accused each other of corruption, fraud, coup, of conspiring mafia.
The citizenry, who didn’t know who to believe, in the end suspects that both parties are right. It seemed, then, that an imminent result of the clash of powers was coming, but in the end an accomplice agreement prevailed: the contubernium and a vitiated peace. In the meantime, the belligerents decide to make the most of this political crisis.
We can take this chaotic situation back to the electoral results of the 2015 presidential elections, which were not recognized by the losing candidate Keiko Fujimori, and which, with a majority parliamentary bench, was finally able to remove President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski two years later, which accentuated the crisis. policy that strangely lasts to this day.
The following presidential elections in April 2021 were also not recognized by the eternal loser Keiko Fujimori. Current president Pedro Castillo, a rural teacher with no party, program or ideology, seemed to be wavering in his post since the first day of his term, but this strange result was not expected.
If any of the public powers were able to politically eliminate their opponents, they would run the risk of being out of the game in the face of a new general election, which would make them all losers. Under this consideration of the risk of losing their electorally acquired jobs, Congress approved, without further ado, the cabinets proposed by the incumbent president, no matter how radical and confrontational, which were not slow to fall, burdened by their own mistakes and scandals. .
Less than half a year into power, the new government is paralyzed in the face of serious problems, such as the oil spill in the Peruvian sea by the company REPSOL, without being able to sanction the violators or adopt urgent cleaning and decontamination action.
Confrontation gave way to negotiation
The responsible politicians have realized that they need each other, not to undertake a national project or to carry out some kind of reform to get out of the crisis; but because they cannot lose the investment they made in the 2021 election campaign. Furthermore, a weak and incompetent president is a magnificent opportunity for the powers to actually regain the economic and legal power they have lost in recent years, whether in the education sector , in transport, in construction and in the various public tenders that the State calls permanently.
The mere private interest of the protagonists in this confusion prevailed over their apparent ideological differences. They became “pocket” partners and validated a new form of political regime: the booty state.
However, a State cannot remain immobile, inactive, paralyzed indefinitely. Its tasks of preserving the lives of its citizens become an imminent danger to the people themselves. The paralysis of the ongoing vaccination process will cause new fatalities, as occurred during a year and a half of the pandemic, where Peru was the country with the highest average number of deaths from COVID in the world, compared to a State reduced by 30 years of neoliberalism and the huge mistakes of a highly incompetent incumbent president.
Policy errors cost lives, affect people’s health, and cause humanitarian disasters, as Michel Foucault points out with the concept of “biopolitics” that refers to the regulation of the population by the State. Therefore, a pro-impunity pact cannot be sustained over time. Something has to happen and will happen. The State is not just its public power, its political parties; the State is, above all, its citizens, its civil society.
How long can a booty state last?
The booty state cannot last long, it is just a breath (or drowning), a short-lived accident. The State will react to the contamination of its most harmful elements. A State has its own defense mechanisms: its legal system, its critical mass (intellectuals, artists, students, academics, journalists), especially its social base.
In a context in which the conditions of the population’s well-being and life itself are in danger, the State is revolting in its bowels and will turn against its governmental leadership. It will be society itself that will push for an institutional transition, through electoral mechanisms that will reestablish a minimum guarantee of peaceful coexistence and the health of its people.
Finally, the paradoxical implicit pact of the ultra-left (Peru Livre) and the ultra-right (Força Popular e Renovação Popular) in Peru, which a little less than a year ago faced each other as mortal enemies in the 2021 presidential elections, and which less than a month ago if they were threatened with vacancy and dissolution, it will not resist the slightest test of loyalty.
This is an arrangement of immediate convenience that will collapse as soon as one of these political actors sees an incentive to get rid of the other. Meanwhile, this precarious alliance leaves the Peruvian state adrift, subject to paralysis and open looting.
